V. I. Lenin

Speech In Memory Of Y. M. Sverdlov

At A Special Session OfThe All-Russia Central Executive Committee

March 18, 1919

Delivered:March 18, 1919First Published:PravdaNo. 60,  March 20, 1919; Published according to  the verbatim report, verified with thePravdatextSource:Lenin’sCollected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 89-94Translated:George HannaTranscription/HTML Markup:David Walters & Robert CymbalaCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002; Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of theGNU Free Documentation License.

Comrades, today, when the workers of all countries
    are honouring the memory of the heroic rise and tragic end of the
    Paris Commune we have to inter the remains of Yakov Mikhailovich
    Sverdlov. In the course of our revolution, and in its victories,
    Comrade Sverdlov succeeded in expressing more fully and integrally
    than anybody else the chief and most important features of the
    proletarian revolution, and this, even more than his boundless
    devotion to the cause of the revolution, made him significant as a
    leader of the proletarian revolution.

Comrades, people who judge by what they see on the surface,
    the numerous enemies of our revolution, and those who to this day
    vacillate between the revolution and its opponents, consider the
    most striking feature of our revolution to be the determined and
    relentlessly firm way it has dealt with the exploiters and the
    enemies of the working people. There is no doubt that without
    this, without revolutionary violence, the proletariat could not
    have triumphed. Nor can there be any doubt that revolutionary
    violence was a necessary and legitimate weapon of the revolution
    only at definite stages of its development, only under definite
    and special conditions, and that a far more profound and permanent
    feature of this revolution and condition of its victory was, and
    remains, the organisation of the proletarian masses, the
    organisation of the working people. 

      And it is this organisation of millions of working people that
      constitutes the best stimulant for the revolution, its deepest
      source of victory. And it is this feature of the proletarian
      revolution which, in the course of the struggle, brought to the
      fore those leaders who best expressed that specific feature of
      our revolution that was never seen in revolutions before,
      namely, the organisation of the masses. This feature of the
      proletarian revolution also brought to the fore Yakov Sverdlov,
      a man who was first and foremost an organiser.

Comrades, we Russian revolutionaries, particularly in the
      stern days of the prolonged, sometimes painful and excessively
      long period of preparation for the revolution, suffered because
      of the gulf between theory, principle and programme and our
      practical work. We suffered most of all from a too deep
      engrossment in theory divorced from direct action.

The history of the Russian revolutionary movement over a
      period of many decades contains a list of martyrs who were
      devoted to the revolutionary cause, but who had no opportunity
      to put their revolutionary ideals into practice. In this
      respect, the proletarian revolution, for the first time,
      provided these formerly isolated heroes of the revolutionary
      struggle with real ground, a real basis, a real environment, a
      real audience, and a real proletarian army in which they could
      display their talents. And in this respect, the most outstanding
      leaders are those who, as practical, efficient organisers, have
      succeeded in winning for themselves an exceptionally prominent
      place such as Yakov Sverdlov won for himself and rightly
      occupied.

If we survey the life of this leader of the proletarian
      revolution we see that his wonderful organising talents
      developed in the course of long struggle. We see that this
      leader of the proletarian revolution himself cultivated every
      one of his wonderful gifts as a great revolutionary who had
      passed through and experienced different epochs in the severest
      conditions of revolutionary activity. He dedicated himself
      entirely to the revolution in the very first period of his
      activities, when still a youth who had barely acquired political
      consciousness. In that period, at the very beginning of the
      twentieth century, Comrade Sverdlov stood before  us as the most
      perfect type of professional revolutionary, a man who had
      entirely given up his family and all the comforts and habits of
      the old bourgeois society, a man who devoted himself heart and
      soul to the revolution, and who for many years, even decades,
      passing from prison to exile and from exile to prison,
      cultivated those characteristics which steeled revolutionaries
      for many, many years.

However, this professional revolutionary never, not even for
      a moment, lost contact with the masses. Although the conditions
      of tsarism condemned him, like all the revolutionaries of those
      days, mainly to underground, illegal activities, even then, even
      in those underground and illegal activities, Sverdlov always
      marched shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand with the advanced
      workers who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, began to
      take the place of the earlier generation of revolutionary
      intellectuals.

It was at this time that scores and hundreds of advanced
      workers took up activities and acquired that steel-like hardness
      in the revolutionary struggle which, together with the closest
      contact with the masses, made it possible to bring about a
      successful proletarian revolution in Russia. It is precisely
      this long period of illegal activity that most of all
      characterises the man who was constantly in the fight, who never
      lost contact with the masses, who never left Russia, who always
      worked in conjunction with the best of the workers, and who, in
      spite of the isolation from general life to which persecution
      condemned the revolutionary, succeeded in becoming not only a
      beloved leader of the workers, not only a leader who was most
      familiar with practical work, but also an organiser of the
      advanced proletarians. Some people were of the opinion—and
      this applies mostly to our opponents, or to the
      waverers—that this complete absorption in illegal
      activities, this specific feature of the professional
      revolutionary, cut him off from the masses. But the
      revolutionary activities of Yakov Sverdlov prove to us how
      utterly mistaken this opinion was, that, on the contrary, this
      boundless devotion to the revolutionary cause, which is typical
      of the lives of people who had seen the inside of many prisons
      and had been in exile in the remotest regions of Siberia,
      produced such leaders, the flower of ourproletariat. And when this was combined with a knowledge of
	men and organisational ability, it produced great
	organisers. The illegal circles, revolutionary underground
	work, the illegal Party, which nobody personified or expressed
	so integrally as Yakov Sverdlov—this was the practical
	school through which he passed, and the only school that could
	have enabled him to reach the position of the first man in the
	first socialist Soviet Republic, the position of the first
	organiser of the broad proletarian masses.

Comrades, all those who, like myself, have had occasion to
      work with Comrade Sverdlov day after day, had it vividly brought
      home to them that it was the exceptional organising talent of
      this man which gave us that which we have been so proud of, so
      justly proud of, up to now. He made it possible for us to carry
      on concerted, efficient, really organised activities, activities
      worthy of the organised proletarian masses, and answering to the
      requirements of the proletarian revolution—those
      concerted, organised activities without which we could not have
      achieved a single success, without which we could not have
      overcome any one of the innumerable difficulties which we have
      had to face, and without which we would not have been able to
      stand up to any one of the severe trials we experienced in the
      past, and are experiencing at the present time.

In that seething struggle that is revolution, at that
      special post which every revolutionary occupies, at a time when
      the work of even a small body of men takes the form of
      deliberations, of enormous importance is high moral prestige won
      in the course of the struggle, unquestionable and unchallenged
      prestige, the roots of which lie, of course not in abstract
      morals, but in the morals of the revolutionary fighter, the
      morals of the rank and file of the revolutionary masses.

The fact that for over a year we have been able to bear the
      incredible burdens that have fallen to the lot of a narrow
      circle of devoted revolutionaries, the fact that the leading
      groups could so firmly, quickly, and unanimously decide the most
      difficult problems, is due entirely to the prominent place among
      them occupied by such an exceptionally talented organiser as
      Yakov Sverdlov. He alone managed to acquire an amazing knowledge
      of the leading  men of the proletarian movement, he alone, in
      the course of the long years of struggle—to which I can
      refer here only very briefly—succeeded in acquiring the
      wonderful intuition of the practical worker, the wonderful
      talent of an organiser, an absolutely unchallenged prestige,
      thanks to which he was able to take sole charge of some of the
      largest branches of the work of the All-Russia Central Executive
      Committee which only a group of ordinary people could cope
      with. He alone succeeded in winning for himself such a position
      that on a large number of extremely big and important practical
      questions of organisation, his mere word was sufficient to
      secure an unchallenged and final settlement, without
      conferences, without a formal vote; and everybody felt convinced
      that the questions had been settled on the basis of such
      profound practical knowledge and organising intuition that not
      only hundreds and thousands of advanced workers, but also the
      masses would accept that settlement as final.

History long ago proved that in the course of the struggle
      great revolutions bring great men to the forefront and develop
      talents that had previously seemed impossible. Nobody would have
      believed that the school of the illegal study circle and
      underground activities, the school of the small, persecuted
      Party, the school of Turukhansk prison could produce this
      organiser who won absolutely unchallenged prestige, the
      organiser of Soviet power throughout Russia, the man, unique in
      his knowledge, who organised the work of the Party which created
      the Soviets and established the Soviet government which is now
      making its arduous, painful, bloody but triumphant advance to
      all nations, to all countries throughout the world.

We shall never be able to replace this man who had
      cultivated such an exceptional organising talent, if by
      replacement we mean finding one man, one comrade, with all these
      qualities. Nobody who has been close to Yakov Sverdlov and has
      watched him constantly at work can have any doubt that in this
      respect he is irreplaceable. The work he performed as an
      organiser, in choosing men and appointing them to responsible
      posts in all the various departments, will be performed in
      future only if we appoint whole groups of men to handle the
      different major departments that he had  sole charge of, and if
      these men, following in his footsteps, come near to doing what
      this one man did alone.

But the proletarian revolution is strong precisely because
      its roots run deep. We know that it promotes new men to take the
      place of those who devotedly sacrificed their lives in the
      struggle, they are perhaps less experienced, possess less
      knowledge, and are at first less trained, but they are men who
      have broad contacts with the masses and who are capable of
      promoting from their ranks groups of men to take the place of
      the departed geniuses, to continue their cause, to continue
      along the road they pursued and to complete what they had
      begun. In this respect we are fully convinced that the
      proletarian revolution in Russia and all over the world will
      promote group after group of men, numerous sections of the
      proletariat and of the working peasantry, which will possess
      that practical knowledge of life, that organising talent,
      collective if not individual, without which the million-strong
      army of the proletariat cannot achieve victory.

The memory of Comrade Yakov Sverdlov will serve not only as
      a permanent symbol of the revolutionary’s devotion to his
      cause and as the model of how to combine a practical sober mind,
      practical skill, close contact with the masses and ability to
      guide them; it is also a pledge that ever-growing numbers of
      proletarians, guided by these examples, will march forward to
      the complete victory of the world communist revolution.